Shusaku Endo | Criticism

SOURCE: "A Voice of Moral Reasoning," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 18, 1994.

[In the following review, Schoenberger discusses how Endo guides his characters in a search for the moral truth without sounding pompous or preachy in his collection of short stories The Final Martyrs.]

In a country where the conservative Establishment remains unapologetic about the stain of naked aggression during World War II, and where a ranking cabinet minister recently denied the veracity of the Nanking Massacre, Shusaku Endo stands out as a lonely voice in a wasteland of moral reasoning. This Roman Catholic writer, often described as Japan's Graham Greene, has been struggling with the slippery themes of right and wrong, defiance and cowardice, martyrdom and apostasy since his country emerged, psychically burned and morally bewildered, from the debacle of war.

His fiction may not translate with the brilliance of a twisted artist such as Yukio...